If you traveled back to 1950, and told people that in 75 years we would be struggling to shut down coal plants and still used petrol in most cars, they would not have believed you. The future was atomic-powered, after all.

If you traveled back to 1975 and told people that in 50 years Concorde would be long retired with no replacement and that commercial supersonic transport no longer existed, they would not have believed you.

If you traveled back to 2000, and told undergrad Eiki that in 25 years nanotech would seem like a fad despite all of academia shoving the prefix "nano" into their grant proposals and that the nanoscale assembler would still not exist 25 years later, I would not have believed you. I might have been relieved but I would have been skeptical.

If you traveled back to 2015 and told optimistic 37-year old Eiki that in ten years fully automated self-driving would still be mostly a tech demo unseen outside of the Bay area and a handful of other places, that very few people would ever have been driven by a car operating on its own, and that basically no one that drives for a living would yet be disemployed by self-driving vehicles, I would not have believed you.

Be careful when you declare the adoption of some technology to be inevitable or just-around-the-corner.

I return to making long-form video and build a useful storage rack for my bits of plywood, plastic, and metal. As always remember to like, comment, and subscribe!

Happiness is the feeling that power increases—that resistance is being overcome.

—Nietzsche

This famous definition sticks in the throat a bit because of Nietzsche's dark reputation and how it makes that “power” sound, but try a small substitution with modern therapeutic language: “Happiness is the feeling that you are being empowered” and notice how differently it hits. Or how about this very slight modification: “Happiness is the feeling that you are moving in the right direction”?

Looked at this way, Nietzsche turns into an old softy, offering us a surprisingly gentle and generous definition, in which happiness is no destination, no distant mountain peak where all is well forevermore, but something accessible, even easily so. No matter what gloomy valley you find yourself in, one step up into light—and even into power, if you will—is enough.

At the beginning of the year I published to YouTube this video, in which I build a smart sprinkler controller using a Raspberry Pi and Open Sprinkler software. It's gradually becoming one of my most popular videos. Although I've been neglecting this blog somewhat, I have been making video content! Be sure and subscribe on YouTube if you'd like to be kept aware of those projects.

Recently I completed work on a website that featured a lot of elements with lines tilted 30 degrees from the vertical. That site is Vaba Design, the new home of my professional portfolio, of which more anon. Seeking fun ways to echo that theme in as many design elements as possible, I hit upon the following method for transforming the bullets from an unordered list into 30 degree parallelograms, without using images.

ul li {
  list-style: none;
}
ul li::before {
  transform: skewX(30deg);
  content: "\25aa";
  display: inline-block;
  width: 1em;
}

The content line above inserts a Unicode character, in this case U+25AA or “Black Small Square” before the rest of the line. That gets skewed into a parallelogram with the transform declaration. Depending on other things like fonts and colors, it could look like this:

This works pretty well except if your list item overflows a single line, in which case the second line won't indent as you might want. It will start at the beginning of the bullet instead of starting where the text of the first line starts. But if that's not a problem for you, give this method a try.